The Terrible-Tempered Star Chef of London

By SARAH LYALL

Published: February 23, 2005

THE television critic who dared to suggest to Gordon Ramsay last month that he enroll in anger-management lessons should have known she was never going to win that argument.

Mr. Ramsay, London's most celebrated and most notorious chef, was onstage in Los Angeles at the time, giving a cooking demonstration to about 200 critics to promote his new television series for Fox. He was not pleased. He asked for a name. ''Annie,'' she answered.

''Annie, your taxi's here,'' he announced.

At 38, Mr. Ramsay is the maestro of a seven-restaurant empire in London, including an eponymous restaurant in Chelsea with three Michelin stars, and the rejuvenated restaurants at the Savoy, the Connaught and Claridge's hotels.

But he is known as much for his reputation as the Angry Young(ish) Man of British cuisine as he is for the excellence of his food. He has reduced cooks to tears, thrown an unfriendly critic (and Joan Collins) out of one of his restaurants and sworn at a former cabinet minister who appeared on one of his shows.

American television viewers have had a taste of his temper as he worked makeovers of failing restaurants on ''Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares,'' which just ended a four-episode run on BBC America. On March 1 at 9 p.m. that network will broadcast the first two episodes of the show that helped cement his volcanic reputation, ''Ramsay's Boiling Point,'' a fly-on-the-wall documentary of the struggles and stresses that went into starting his Chelsea restaurant in 1998. It showcases him screaming and cursing at his workers, even shoving them and firing about one a week.

This summer, if all goes as scheduled, Fox will broadcast ''Hell's Kitchen,'' in which a group of would-be chefs compete under his supervision to win a Los Angeles restaurant of their own. Mr. Ramsay reportedly scuffled with a contestant.

On his British shows Mr. Ramsay is a mixture of perfectionism, knife-edge impatience and flamboyantly bad language. In one episode of ''Kitchen Nightmares'' viewers were treated to what a critic here called ''possibly the most concentrated burst of swearing ever to appear on British television.''

But you can see why he became cross. The restaurants were run by incompetents and laggards. One fed Mr. Ramsay rancid scallops, which made him vomit. At moments the furrows in his brow creased so deeply, his dismay was so palpable, that he seemed on the verge of madness.

Part of this is shtick, he maintains: an exaggerated version of himself cranked up for television and reinforced by deft editing. He swears that he is much calmer off screen and out of the kitchen. But he insists that all this histrionic shouting is normal in the restaurant world, where businesses can fail as disastrously as souffl?and reputations rest on such minutiae as the precisely right moment for adding the truffle shavings to the risotto.

''I've been cooking since the age of 19, and I've never come across a namsy-wamsy, incy-pincy kitchen where everyone's a best mate,'' Mr. Ramsay said over tea at Claridge's restaurant, one of the two of which he has total charge. (He oversees his other restaurants, which are owned by his holding company and managed by his partners, the chefs Angela Hartnett and Marcus Wareing.)

''When there's no adrenaline flying high and there's very little pressure created, you don't get results,'' he added.

But, he said, many of his employees have been with him for years, moving loyally from restaurant to restaurant. ''Boiling Point'' involves his starting a restaurant with workers who followed him from his previous place.

''He's a perfectionist,'' Ms. Hartnett said by telephone. ''He demands the best, and if he has to shout to get the best, he does it. It's not like he does it every day, and in the end it's all about the food. It's constructive criticism, and it's never personal.''

In any case all was disappointingly calm at Claridge's, even Mr. Ramsay. He chatted in impeccable French to the headwaiter and sent complimentary glasses of Champagne to two women out for a birthday treat. He is a large, fit man (he runs in marathons in his spare time) with tousled dirty-blond hair and an expressive face, upon which seem to be etched all the anxieties of his profession.

Mr. Ramsay has been on both sides of pressure. He has been shouted at by the best in the business. His first proper restaurant jobs were with two famously exacting characters, Marco Pierre White (''He was awesome, a power freak'') and Guy Savoy, who yelled at him in French, a language that luckily he did not yet fully understand.

''I didn't take it personally,'' he said. ''You're in a house that's phenomenal. Who the hell am I to walk in there and think I shouldn't be upset when they tell me off?''

He continued: ''There's a lot of determination and frustration and aggression that goes into making something perfect, and there's a price to pay for it. You can't buy Thomas Keller's and Jean-Georges's and Alain Ducasse's cookbooks and study them word for word and then think you're going to be a perfect chef. It doesn't work like that.

''If that's what you want, go and work in an Aberdeen Angus steakhouse.''

Raised in a housing project in Stratford-Upon-Avon, Mr. Ramsay thought about food only in the sense of wishing there was more on the table. His father was a tough man, who insisted that he put salt on his oatmeal (sugar was for sissies, he said) and whose dream was that his son play professional soccer, which his son did as a teenager for three years on the youth squad of the Glasgow Rangers.

But after one too many injuries he enrolled in a hotel-management program and came alive during a work-experience stint in a restaurant kitchen.

''There was nothing like it,'' he said. ''I loved the atmosphere, the boisterousness. I said to my tutor, 'I want to be a chef.'''

When he started out, the Savoy Grill turned him down for a job. Now he owns the place and has modernized it besides.

Mr. Ramsay is restless, constantly reworking his menus and his empire. He is soon to open a restaurant in Tokyo. He dreams of opening one in New York. ''Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares Revisited'' is to be broadcast in May, and he may do another season of ''Nightmares.''

Mr. Ramsay's four small children have not been to his restaurants or seen his other life and personality.

''I have a normal existence,'' he said. ''I take my jacket off and leave my problems at work.

''You do have good days. It just doesn't show up on television.''

Photo: HIGH DRAMA -- Gordon Ramsay, at Claridge's in London, has two new television shows that will be shown in the United States. (Photo by Jonathan Player for The New York Times)